#206 - Last

1 Family Photo, 1 Dad-Joke, Many Highlights

Jul 03, 2026

Family Photo:
The Last Time You’ll Do Something

If you define it specifically enough, every day contains something you’ll do for the last time:

The last time you cut up junk mail, while kneeling on the bare floor, wearing a train museum hat with a purple shirt.
The last time your eldest child loose his top right baby tooth.
The last time you eating ice cream with your five year-old in the month of May, knowing next year he’ll be six.

Sometimes you know it’s the last time as it happens. Sometimes you don’t.

There are last times you wonder about:

The last time you find out you’re pregnant.
The last time you hold your newborn child.

There are last times you hope about:

The last time you vomit on the sidewalk due to poor life choices.
The last time you say ‘I do’ to the person you love at a gathering of friends and family—one of life’s best choices.

We moved into a new house this month. Will it be the last time we move into a new house?

I think about the elderly couple who lived here before us. We didn’t know them, but the neighbors say the were kind. She was sick for a while. He passed away shortly after she did (though not in the house, the real estate agent was quick to interject). We still get their junk mail, though there’s nowhere to forward it. It’s a peculiar sort of getting to know someone.

What were their lasts?

The last time they checked the mail.
The last time she cooked them dinner in their renovated kitchen.
The last time he worked on a project, pulling tools down from his garage shelves.
The last time they held each other in bed.

Did they know these would be their last times? Would they have experienced them differently if they did?

Every few weeks I cradle Calvin in my arms and sing him a bedtime song. He doesn’t fit in them like he did when he was a baby. It’s awkward, his limbs spill out everywhere, and he flops around like a prize-winning fish.

But if I don’t, then the last time I did already passed.

Dad Joke:
Do The Last Section

The mayor from a small town hires a guy to paint the road to a city 30 miles away.

“We’ll divide the road in 3 sections of 10 miles each. You can come get your paycheck after you finish each section.”, says the Mayor.

The guy accepts the offer and starts that same day.

He finishes the first segment after 3 days.

When he goes to the town hall to get his first paycheck, the mayor says “Wow, that was fast, keep up this pace!”, and hands him the money.

The guy continues with the next section. This time he spends 3 weeks painting the second section.

He goes to the town hall again, and the mayor says “You were really fast with the first section, but now you slowed down. Try to paint the last section faster,” and hands him the second paycheck.

The painter proceeds with the last section. He takes 3 whole months until he’s done. When he arrives for his money, the mayor says angrily, “Man, you were really fast with the first section. Then you took 3 weeks with the second section. Now 3 months for the last section?!?! I hope you have an explanation!!!”

“Well...” Says the guy. “The paint bucket was further away each time”.

Source: Reddit / Gemini

Highlights:
The Last Time You’ll Do Something

The Last Time You’ll Do Something by Sam Harris

Each time you do something, pleasant or unpleasant, that is one less time you will do it. And there will come a time when you will have done something the final time. And you will rarely know when that is.
For instance: I used to love to ski, and I now haven’t skied in well over a decade. Will I ever ski again? I have no idea.
But I can assure you that the last time I took off my skis, I was not even dimly aware of the possibility that it might be the last time. That I might live for many, many more years and yet this stood a good chance of being the last time I would ever ski.

The Last Bus Problem by Andrew Bosworth

The busses [at the Sundance Film Festival] come by each location so frequently that you rarely check the schedule; you just wait. So when a film lets out and there are a ton of people waiting for busses it is a very polite affair.
Except for the last screening of the day.
The busses stop running not long after the final screenings let out. That means there is concern that the bus there now may be the last bus. It is often snowing. Accommodations are generally far from the theaters. Everyone wants to get on that bus and many would push their fellow moviegoer aside for the opportunity.
...
When we [at Facebook] had a weekly or (one-time) monthly push for code changes a huge number of changes would arrive at the very last minute. When the build broke or was unstable (which was often) it was invariably a consequence of one of these late arriving changes.
The reason is simple, like moviegoers hustling to get on the last bus, the developers saw the prospect of being delayed another week and abandoned all caution to try to get their code a ticket to ride.
When we went to daily pushes, however, this behavior improved dramatically. When the consequence of missing a release was waiting one day the pressure to get code in was reduced dramatically. And the code that went in was relatively more ready for deployment.
...
The fundamental lesson here is that for any repeating process it is important to consider both planning horizons and cycle time and the impact those have on the incentives they create for teams. When possible, having transparency about long term schedules and more continuous evaluation processes will remove gamesmanship from the equation and allow teams to focus primarily on the problem they are trying to solve.

My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday’s Endless Appetizers by Caity Weaver

What if I told you that mozzarella sticks never had to end? That for $10, you could eat for free (for $10) for the rest of your natural life? That there exists a spot in the space-time continuum in which it is always Friday? That there are free refills on all Slushes™ excluding Red Bull® branded items?
Last Monday TGI Friday’s unveiled a new promotion (available at many TGI Friday’s locations, but none on the island of Manhattan) whereby customers can gorge themselves on unlimited appetizers—without fear of punishment, embarrassment, or ostracization—for a one-time payment of $10. The promotion is called “Endless Appetizers.”
The day after “Endless Appetizers” was announced, I went to TGI Friday’s in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay. I wanted to challenge the hubris of a company co-opting the infinite for a marketing gimmick. I wanted to demand accountability from copywriters. I wanted to call their bluff and eat appetizers until they kicked me out, to seek the limit of this supposedly limitless publicity stunt. I soon learned the limit does not exist.
...

Ten hours later, my editor, Max Read, messages me to outline the conditions this exercise must meet:
- I will not take advantage of the TGI Friday’s wifi, read a book, or go to sleep.
- I will stay at least six hours past the restaurant’s 11 a.m. opening time.
- I will consume mozzarella sticks with the voraciousness of bacteria feasting on the muscle tissue of a corpse. (This is not so much a condition as a given.)
He then proposes a bonus: If you can stay till 1 a.m. I’ll give you a week off.
In a separate conversation, my colleague Taylor offers to pay me $3 for every mozzarella stick I eat past the first 30.
The offer before me is now one week’s vacation and theoretically infinite profit...

editor’s note: the word count and quality of the mozzarella stick piece are shockingly high.
🤔 I wonder if I have read it for the last time.